The changing experience of time

The Folded Clock, as crafted by novelist Heidi Julavits, is intricate and delicately worked. Time doesn’t flow linearly in this memoir as we might expect. What at first glance appears to be the diary of a writer in her 40s living an enviable life—an apartment in Manhattan, a house in Maine, sabbaticals in Europe—turns into a structure more complex, like an origami crane. Meditations on marriage and friendship appear and reappear. Diary entries might skip six months, or jump back a year. Julavits arranges the raw material of her diary in such a way as to provoke insight across the units of time that we normally experience: the day, the week and the month.

A metaphysical mystery

Imagine you had the power to make streetlights dim when you walked beneath them and could probe the innermost secrets of the human mind. This is what life is like for Julia Severn, a young psychic whose mother committed suicide when she was just an infant. Though Julia’s powers are impressive, all attempts to contact her mother beyond the grave have been unsuccessful. Instead, Julia...

What a tangled web we weave

The funny thing about the truth is that it always has more than one side, especially when one side makes a better story. In these instances, the truth can perform a series of permutations, creating multiple versions of itself, each equally accurate and equally flawed. In Believer editor Heidi Julavits' third novel, The Uses of Enchantment, Mary Veal is about to uncover these complexities and...

Through a modern looking glass

Expect to be confused when you begin Heidi Julavits' imaginative second novel, The Effect of Living Backwards. Even the author warns of the challenges ahead for readers. On the frontispiece, she quotes a passage from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass in which the Queen tells Alice that "the effect of living backwards. . . always makes one a little giddy at first." Like Julavits'...

It gets hot here in Tennessee. And dry. But even in a drought year, to the stoic inhabitants of the Dust Bowl plains in the 1930s, this region would probably have seemed like a tropical rain forest. For nearly a decade, plains farmers endured the ravages of sudden, severe, dirt-hurling storms that destroyed their livestock and eroded the soil from the fields. When first-time author Heidi...

Audio Column by Linda Stankard

It gets hot here in Tennessee. And dry. But even in a drought year, to the stoic inhabitants of the Dust Bowl plains in the 1930s, this region would probably have seemed like a tropical rain forest. For nearly a decade, plains farmers endured the ravages of sudden, severe, dirt-hurling storms that destroyed their livestock and eroded the soil from the fields. When first-time author Heidi...